Early on in my internship, a senior doctor pulled me aside after hearing a couple of other interns grouse with me about our workload. “Caring for patients is a privilege, a calling,” he said. “Remember, no one forced you to sign your contract.”
For years those words came to mind whenever I cared for patients who had lethal, and potentially contagious, infections, patients like Jean (not her real name), who was in her 50s when I met her. She had contracted hepatitis C from receiving a vaccination with a contaminated needle years before, and the symptoms of her end-stage liver failure had become increasingly difficult to tolerate over the last year. She itched constantly from jaundice; her memory had deteriorated; and she had had episodes of life-threatening bleeding that had landed her in the intensive care unit on two separate occasions. According to the nurses, Jean had walked into the hospital on the night she was to receive a liver transplant, bubbling over about the new start on life she would have with the new organ.
Despite Jean’s optimism, she ended up suffering from a series of devastating postoperative complications and infections. By the time I came onto her surgical team as one of the interns, she had spent three months in the hospital.
One morning soon after I began taking care of her, one of the nurses noticed that Jean had become short of breath. A chest X-ray showed fluid in her lungs, fluid that I could drain to help her breathe. The drainage procedure wouldn’t take long once the needle was in her chest; but because everything would be done using sterile technique, once the procedure started, I could not leave Jean’s side or touch anything other than the instruments I was using.
My beeper went off the moment I slipped on the sterile gloves. I tried to ignore it, forging ahead with the procedure. I disinfected Jean’s skin, laid down sterile drapes and began numbing her skin with a syringe filled with anesthetic solution.
Over and over again, my beeper went off. And I continued ignoring it until the fifth page, when I began to worry that there might be an emergency elsewhere in the hospital. I wriggled my hips against Jean’s nightstand, trying to dislodge the beeper from my waist without touching it or contaminating the sterile field. I shouted for help, but no one answered my calls.
Finally, when my pager went off for the sixth time, I pulled off my left glove and reached down, groping for the beeper hanging on my right hip while walking toward the door to find a phone.
I felt a sharp sting. Looking down, I saw a small scarlet drop emerging from the tip of my left index finger. I had stabbed my finger against the needle I had just used to anesthetize Jean’s skin, a needle I still held in my right hand.
I stared at the tiny red bloom on my fingertip. And for a moment, I felt the floor beneath my feet give way, pulling everything — Jean, my heart, my work, my life — down with it. I stood there paralyzed, staring at the puncture wound on my fingertip and unable to stop the movie playing in my mind’s eye, a movie of a future like Jean’s. Jean would never leave the hospital and, a few months later, would die in the I.C.U., succumbing to a final, massive infection.
Over the years, I have been stuck, cut, coughed on, scratched and splashed several more times. Each time, I feel the floor and my life fall away. I have never contracted a life-threatening infectious disease; but sometimes I catch myself wondering if it’s only a matter of time. During the SARS epidemic a few years back, for example, health care workers were disproportionately affected; certain hospitals in affected areas reported that over half their workers contracted the disease.
And then every day there is news that swine flu may still reach pandemic proportions.
When I think about the possibility of becoming infected with a potentially deadly disease during the course of my work — when I allow myself to think about it — I struggle to reconcile my beliefs about a doctor’s responsibilities and my fears about my own safety.
But, always, I arrive at the same conclusion. Like that senior doctor, I believe it’s a privilege, a calling, to take care of patients. And I believe that in deciding to practice medicine, I have consented to an unspoken contract with the public, one that requires that I take care of those who are sick.
Lately, however, I have also begun to think that there is another side to that contract. Maybe there are obligations that the general public has to its health care workers.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/21/health/21chen.html
